You Are Not a Problem to Be Solved
We live in a culture obsessed with self-improvement. Scroll a social feed for five minutes and you’ll find a dozen ways to be more efficient, more productive, more healed, more enlightened—to be your Best Self! There’s always a new hack, a better mindset, a next step.
The message underneath all that noise? You are a problem—and you need to be solved.
But what if the path to growth isn’t about fixing anything?
What if it's about listening more deeply, resisting less, and cultivating a relationship with yourself that’s grounded in rhythm, not performance?
That’s the journey we’re beginning here.
The Culture of Fixing or the Wisdom of Flow?
In Classical Chinese Medicine, health isn’t a destination or a “perfect state”—it’s an ongoing, living relationship with the spirited rhythms of nature. You’re not a machine to be optimized. You’re a landscape—seasonal, shifting, alive with cycles.
When something feels “off,” the question shouldn’t be “What’s wrong with me?”
We should ask ourselves “What’s out of rhythm?”
This worldview draws deeply from Taoist philosophy, where harmony isn’t created by controlling nature, but by flowing with it. Laozi, a great philosopher and author of the Tao Te Ching, shared this: “Man follows the earth. Earth follows heaven. Heaven follows the Tao. The Tao follows what is natural.”
And Confucius, often seen as the voice of order and structure, offered a complementary Taoist echo which I’ve paraphrased: The heart of wise leadership is rhythm—being honest, grounded, and walking in harmony with the seasons. This isn’t just coaching or advice—it’s personal guidance. Self-cultivation, in this sense, means attuning yourself to your own seasons. Slowness in winter. Expansion in spring. The breath out. The breath in.
Embracing the Shadow
If Taoism asks us to move with nature, Jungian psychology asks us to move with the unconscious—and to stop trying to banish its darker corners.
Carl Jung stated: “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
In other words: True growth doesn’t come from a perpetual positive state. It comes from turning toward the parts we usually push away—fear, grief, anger—and making space for them to be seen, heard, and felt.
This work isn’t about fixing those parts of you. It’s about welcoming them in. It’s about being willing to sit with resistance instead of trying to push past it.
It’s about getting curious—listening for what anxiety might be trying to say, instead of pushing it away. When we start embracing what Jung called the shadow, something shifts. We soften. We react less. We begin to move from a sense of wholeness, not just from our wounds.
A Different Kind of Path
This space is for those who are tired of performance-based healing.
Who are over the hustle of becoming your best self.
Who are ready to root, not just rise.
Here, we’ll explore things like:
• How Taoist ideas like wu wei—the art of not forcing—can help us step out of burnout.
• How Chinese Medicine sees emotion and energy as part of a living, seasonal ecology.
• How Jung’s work invites us to meet resistance, doubt, and the shadow as wise messengers.
• What it means to tend to our inner life—to cultivate, not conquer.
This isn’t about becoming someone new.
It’s about remembering who you are beneath all the pursuit and striving.
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Welcome to the Practice
I named my coaching practice Cultivate because that’s what growth really is—slow, seasonal, relational. It’s not a race. It’s a rhythm.
Thank you for being here.
More soon.
-- Robert Baggett, M. Dip. Ac., CLC
